Assassin's Hunger (9 page)

Torash smiled back and slipped into the suite without further argument. Another shock. The door hissed closed and snicked as the red lock engaged. It wouldn’t be opening again without an override from the captain or Benedetta.

He let out a harsh breath at the squandered opportunity. If the attackers took the ship…

“They won’t if you’d get to your thrice-tangled post,” Shaxi said.

He’d barely muttered the last words aloud, but of course her enhanced hearing had captured the comment. “The captain would want the girls to be safe.”

“They are, for the moment.”

So they were, damn it. “What next?”

She glared at him as if he should know. “My task is to secure the girls—which is done—and then neutralize the threat.”

He gestured. “After you.”

With a shake of her head, she reversed course, out of steerage and back toward the heart of the ship. The heart of the fight.

Though the situation was urgent and grim—and he could very well find himself removed from his covert mission if the underwriters deemed him incompetent or compromised—his gaze wandered down the sleek, powerful form ahead of him.

He’d done well choosing the uniform from ship’s stores. The smart fabric fit her like a second skin, supporting and yielding in all the right places. And the way it cupped her ass—

She spun, hazer at the ready, and he snapped his gaze up with guilty quickness.

She frowned at him, her eyes bright gold with her cyber-embeds at full alert as she scanned his body, lingering at his hip. “You aren’t armed?”

She must have seen his hazer during the scuffle at the cantina. It wasn’t a weapon he showed off. He’d have to be more careful around her. “When the charge hit, I ran to find you three.”

She let out a hissing breath. “I should have left you with the girls.”

He should have stayed there. Then this would all be so very unnecessary. But for the first time in years, his pulse sped of its own accord, the hot flow whispering swiftly through his veins and honing all his senses.

She touched her comm, her eyes unfocused as she listened. “Yes, Captain. They are locked in. On my way.” Without another glance at him, she raced on.

And without another glance at the locked door where his assigned targets lurked, he followed her.

The ship rocked again, the bulkhead groaning. It was more a sound of annoyance than real strain. The attackers had not engaged with a stronger second detonation.

“That charge was too weak to effectively breach the cargo bay hatch,” Shaxi said into her comm. “It’s a distraction.”

“They’ll try to disable the thrusters,” Eril warned. “They want to keep us here so they can crack us like a malac shell at their leisure.”

Her lips curled, not the same smile she’d given Torash, but the fierce delight of a warrior facing battle. “One easy way to take care of that.”

Even as she spoke, the thrusters fired. If anyone had been nearby, they’d gotten a sunburn worse than Khamaseen’s double stars.

But instead of the
Asphodel
’s usual effortless ascension, the ship lurched. Eril cursed and braced himself against the bulkhead. Shaxi swayed with the motion.

He swore again. “The crosswinds have gotten stronger. We won’t be able to rise through them.”

“Seems the captain believes otherwise.”

“There’s no way—”

A roar, louder than either explosion, ripped through the ship. Shaxi’s eyes widened as she was tossed into him. They both clutched for the exposed wall struts, steadying themselves and each other as the ship canted hard to one side.

“They got at least one thruster,” Eril said. He tightened his grip on her upper arm where the smooth curve of muscle met the bone of her shoulder as the ship pitched the other direction.

Shaxi shifted her jaw. “I’m not sure a light cruiser like this can maneuver with a thruster down.”

“Seems the captain believes otherwise,” he said back to her.

She slipped free of his grasp—his fingers clenched on the lingering heat of her body—and staggered down the tilting corridor, slamming into first one wall then the other as the
Asphodel
careened, seemingly on the verge of going down.

He followed her—again with the following; he needed to stop doing that—and they made their way to the corridor outside the bridge.

Jorr was there already along with Patter, another crew member. Both were armed to the teeth. Literally in Jorr’s case since he held an unsheathed nano knife in his mouth. A nano knife’s rudimentary AI interface made it a flashy but unpredictable weapon, most often used in scripted action vids where the blood was no more real than the heroes.

“We won’t be able to break atmo with a thruster down,” Patter said.

“Put us down and we’ll break something else,” Jorr growled around the knife blade. It growled back softly in response. He glanced at Shaxi. “You with me, robot girl?”

“Right ahead of you,” she said.

Eril stiffened against an unfamiliar twist of possessiveness. If anyone was going to be following her, it was him. “Can I borrow someone’s gun?”

They all looked at him, eyebrows raised in six identical disbelieving arcs.

He spread his hands. “If we’re going to charge out there, guns blazing, it’d be nice to have one.”

Jorr spit out the knife and tossed it to him, underhanded. “Maybe save the blazing for your kitchen pans, auxo, and leave the fighting to us.”

Eril caught the tossed knife competently enough, though not so competently that anyone might think it odd for an auxo, but Patter smirked. Shaxi just watched him, brows furrowed again, the gold rings around her pupils expanding and constricting. The
Asphodel
’s crew thought of him as nothing more than a simple supply clerk. But she’d doubted him from the moment she saw him.

Maybe it took one merciless killer to truly see another.

The haft of the knife quivered under his fingers as its component particles tasted his sweat. Some nano blades, usually the larger ceremonial sizes with more extensive colonies of nanotech, allegedly came to possess a primitive sentience. Most civilized societies along the sheerways objected to the blades because for all their cutting-edge science, the resultant AIs—created and nurtured in conflict and fed on their holders’ violence—tended toward instability. Those who carried them were even worse. No one trusted such an unnatural melding of man and machine.

He averted his gaze from Shaxi when she slapped her palm over the comm screen on the wall. She used her cyber-embeds to override the blinking alarm signal and patched through to the
Asphodel
’s forward cam. They had a glimpse of a dozen figures swarming into the otherwise empty hangar.

“That doesn’t look so good,” Patter muttered.

The ship abruptly tilted upward, showing them only the pitted gray surface of the hangar ceiling.

“That looks worse,” Jorr said.

The bridge door slid open, and the captain gripped the doorway when the ship tilted again. “Party out here and I wasn’t invited?”

Patter crossed the plasma cannon over his chest. The giant gun could blow a small sheership out of the sky and seriously destabilize even a larger ship. “We were just getting ready to hang the ‘surprise’ banner.”

“Save it for now. We’re only dealing with a ground incursion.”

Eril steadied himself against the wall. “Yet they seem to have gotten the drop on us.” He wondered why the underwriters hadn’t found a way to alert him their enemies were so close.

Or was this the work of a secondary team? Had the underwriters gotten impatient?

As if she didn’t notice Deynah’s imposing scowl
wasn’t
an invitation to opine, Shaxi said, “The fact they got so close and there’s been no response from port security means someone was paid off. We’re on our own.”

The captain nodded. “Figured that already.”

A low whine, more felt than heard, ripped through the bulkheads around them, as the
Asphodel
’s plasma canons fired. On the screen, the roof of the hangar above them disappeared in a shower of plyscrete rubble. If the thuds against the Asphodel’s hull bothered the captain, there was no sign of it in his eyes, cold and dark as the sheerways themselves.

Slewing once more as they cut through the crosswinds above the hangar, the
Asphodel
soared up into the cloud-choked sky.

“Now,” the captain said, “we need a place to lie low and patch up.”

“There’s only one port on this moon,” Jorr pointed out. “And we just put a hole in it.”

Shaxi cleared her throat. “Only one
official
port.”

Deynah turned his deepset eyes on her. “I take it you have an alternative.”

Eril trailed behind the captain and the commando—how fortunate he’d chosen a tight fit for her since he was seeing so much of her ass—to the navigation chamber. Sheership pilots needed complete sensory isolation while needling through the sheerways, so sightlines were diminished, sound dampened, even the sensation of air felt muted in the chamber. But at the moment, the viewport screens were activated, showing the murky sky of Khamaseen ahead of them.

Evessa, the pilot, already had a sim of the moon summoned up on the dais in the middle of the room. She’d clearly been listening to the captain. “Where is it?”

Shaxi pointed a finger and the ghostly orb of the moon spun in response to her implants’ orders. She zoomed into a mountainous region. “Rampakh. The city was going to be the center for mining in the area. Local outfits are extracting some ores, though at much lower rates than the original terraforming corporation intended. The secondary port serves their needs until they can get to Levare for off-world transport.”

“Isolated, hard to get to,” the captain murmured. “But it’ll be obvious where we’re headed.”

“With the storms right behind us, they won’t be able to follow,” Shaxi said.

“Or we might not be able to get there,” Eril countered.

Shaxi nudged the moon a bare longitude. “I suggest we hole up here, a few clicks from Rampakh. We can send a team to the port for repair materials while keeping the ship concealed.”

Evessa blinked her starfield eyes—the black on black stare speckled with pinprick white lights that marked a gene-modified sheerways navigator. “I thought you were just the babysitter?”

“Let’s do this,” the captain said crisply, “before we fall out of the sky.”

Though most non-sheerspace navigation was handled from the bridge, Evessa’s fingers danced over the console. “There’s a good—or I suppose I should say bad—storm front massed at the foothills. We could disappear behind that veil, but the EM radiation would fry us on our way.”

Shaxi stared at the screen where airborne grit moved likes waves through the sky. “I’ve been studying the shriving winds. If we run a positive charge through the hull, we can deflect the worst of the damage.”

Evessa sucked in her cheeks. “But storms on Khamaseen contain negative ions. A positive charge will just bring the storm down on top of us.”

Shaxi shook her head. “The shriving winds are zwitterionic. Both negative and positive states exist simultaneously on the same molecules, but the positive ions of the alien compounds would be worse for the ship. If we draw the negative charge toward us, we should be able to form a protective shell around us.”

“Become one with the storm,” the captain murmured. “Very poetic.”

Eril stared at Deynah. “You think poetry will keep us from crashing and burning?”

“I used it on Benedetta to excellent effect just last night. There were explosions, but only the kind I like.” The captain grinned as if the prospect of flying into a ship-swallowing sandstorm was also on his list of orgasmic pleasures.

Of course, Eril reminded himself, this was the same man who’d stolen the last l’auralya in the universe as his personal plaything. Was the man so blinded by sex to not see how dangerous her kind could be?

The captain turned to Evessa. “How long?”

“We’ll be at the storm front in an hour. Sooner if it keeps rolling this way.”

“It will,” Shaxi said. “The storm is coming.”

Deynah snorted. “It always is. Make sure the hull charge is ready before then.” He pointed at Shaxi. “I should strap you to the
Asphodel
’s prow like one of those mermaid busts on Old Earth ships.”

“I would be honored,” she said solemnly.

He huffed out another dismissive breath. “Etta went to unlock the twins from their suite, so they have someone watching them. I want you two—” his dark gaze added Eril to the command “—to do a shipwide recon. I want to know how we were found.”

Shaxi straightened. “Sir, as the last to join the crew, I think your suspicion would naturally fall on me.”

“It already did.” The captain gave her a hard smile. “If only it was that easy. But we’ve had these encounters long before you. No, I’m wondering if we picked up a tracker somewhere. Use that notorious Hermitaj tech of yours to find it and you’ll be worth your weight in pixberries.”